Readers who have been hanging around the Intertubalweb for some years may remember how the news and pictures of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 encountering the planet Jupiter were spread with astonishing speed. It seemed something of a coming-of-age moment for the Information Superfreeway. They may not remember that the comet’s head was composed of a score of fragments, possibly owing to an earlier close encounter, and that the grand smashup that we might have enjoyed was thereby diluted. In addition, the actual collision events occurred on the away side of the planet, so what we actually saw finally looked like a mild case of Jovian acne.

Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, showing several dark scars created by collisions of fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The image was made by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 22, 1994, the last day of the impacts. (Credit: ASA/Hubble Space Telescope Comet Team)

Comes now a previously unknown comet or asteroid to make up for that anticlimax. This one evidently plowed into Jupiter’s atmosphere as one great chunk, and it has left a remarkable hole behind it. The photograph in this article from Wired was snapped by one of the new cameras on the Hubble Telescope:

The hole in those clouds, which seem to have the density of tapioca, is about the size of the Pacific Ocean. Worth turning into a screen saver or a stitched sampler on your wall is the final sentence of the article:

If whatever hit Jupiter – and astronomers might never know what it was – had instead struck Earth, it would have caused catastrophic damage to human civilization.

If some such object were to be observed on a collision course with Earth – and, space being pretty big and out there in every possible direction, there’s no reason to assume that we would surely see it coming – if that were the case, what could we do? Let’s assume that Bruce Willis and his friends are unavailable to go up in a conveniently available rocket and blow the thing to smithereens.

(Digression: We never speak of a single smithereen, do we? The dictionary enters the word in the plural form and says it is perhaps from an Irish word and that it means, as we knew, “fragments.” In the present case, though, given our understanding of the origin of comets and asteroids, the thing that hit Jupiter may indeed have been a lone smithereen, while Shoemaker-Levy 9 was in the lexically proper form of smithereens when it struck.)

Anyway, what would we do? The answer is, so far as I know, nothing. Even if we could pretty well estimate the point of impact, it would do you no good to dash around to the other side of the planet. Shock waves, seismic disturbances, tidal waves, dust, and who knows what all would affect us all, everywhere. “Nowhere to run to, Baby, nowhere to hide.”

See the video below:

There’s the faint hope of saving some remnant of the human race underground, for example “at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts…

“…in a ratio of, say, ten females to each male. As each man will be required to do prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.”

But that, of course, was the hagridden Dr. Strangelove, and his fantasies are certainly not to be taken seriously. Readers who, for their sins or in all innocence, have read my earlier postings on space exploration will have anticipated my recommendation. In one word: Mars. In two words: Now.

“Even with the best of search programs, whether anything can be done about an object found to be on a collision course with Earth depends on many factors. The most important are the amount of lead time and the physical properties of the object—its size, shape, spin rate, density, strength, and other characteristics. Scientists believe that kinetic energy interception is adequate for the majority of objects, including those of intermediate size and most likely to cause destructive tsunamis. Such a strategy would involve the use of a nonexplosive projectile sent to strike the object in a particular location at high speed to change its orbit and possibly to fragment it. For the remainder, more aggressive measures, likely involving the use of powerful thermonuclear devices, are thought to be necessary to achieve the same results. Because the physical properties of NEOs are so poorly known, however, it is possible that such measures could do more harm than good—e.g., by breaking a large object into numerous smaller, but still potentially destructive, pieces without deflecting them enough to miss Earth. Validating these options requires additional theory, laboratory experiments, and safe experiments involving actual NEOs in space. In the early years of the 21st century, few, if any, such efforts were being made.”

Meteor Crater (or Barringer Crater), Arizona, U.S., a pit 1.2 km (0.75 mile) in diameter excavated about 50,000 years ago by the explosive impact of an object with the composition of a nickel-iron asteroid and a diameter of perhaps 50 metres (160 feet), at the low end of the size range for destructive impacts. Estimates of the energy released by the impact range between 15 and 40 megatons. (Credit: D.J. Roddy/U.S. Geological Survey)